Introduction

Apache Axis is an implementation of the SOAP ("Simple Object Access Protocol") submission
to W3C.

From the draft W3C specification:

SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment.
It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.

Please see the Reference Library for a list of technical resources that should prove useful.

Axis 1.2 and beyond

Axis 1.1 has proven itself to be a reliable and stable base on which to implement Java Web services.
There is a very active user community and there are
many companies who use Axis for Web services support in their products.

For Axis 1.2, we are focusing on our document/literal support to better address the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 and JAX-RPC 1.1 specifications. And we are fixing as many bug as possible.